[Solved] Distorted image with anamorphic display

[genderfaerie]

My main living room display is a BenQ W100 projector. Its native resolution is 1024x768, but it can use an anamorphic mode to display a widescreen image at that resolution.

The machine it's running on is an Ubuntu 12.04 rig. Using the following xorg.conf options, it outputs a 1360x768 image to the projector, distorted to 1024x768 to display correctly on the projector:

Section "Device"
Option "ModeValidation" "AllowNon60hzmodesDFPModes, NoEDIDDFPMaxSizeCheck, NoVertRefreshCheck, NoHorizSyncCheck, NoDFPNativeResolutionCheck, NoMaxSizeCheck, NoMaxPClkCheck, AllowNonEdidModes, NoEdidMaxPClkCheck"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Option "metamodes" "1360x768 +0+0; 1024x768_60 +0+0"
EndSection

This works perfectly for Gnome, Unity and XBMC, as well as any native game. However, the Steam client and any games streaming within it treat the screen as 1024x768 and display letterboxed, meaning that they are vertically squashed on the anamorphic display.

This isn't really a streaming issue per se, but it has only become a real problem for me since it affects streaming games - it wasn't a problem for just the client to be distorted, and I didn't really notice what was going on. The letterboxing on top of a 16:9 display is very noticable in a game with high-definition characters.

[Steelskin]

To clarify, you encounter this issue when running Big Picture, in which you can't set your resolution to 1360x768? In that case, it sounds like a Big Picture issue, not a Streaming issue.
Might have misunderstood you though.

[genderfaerie]

Yes, I suppose it is more of a Big Picture issue, but it affects streaming games as well. You're not quite right though - Big Picture lets me set a similar resolution (something like 1330x720, I don't have access to that machine from work), but does its own distortion on top of X11, resulting in the wrong image dimensions.

[Pierre-Loup]

I believe Big Picture won't try and set its fullscreen window size manually, instead it asks for your window manager to do so, which might be doing the wrong thing here. What's the output of 'xrandr' in this weird configuration? For Steam itself you might have better luck running it windowed (with -tenfoot -windowed), but it won't directly help with games.

[genderfaerie]

Hi! Thanks for the reply.
I did a bit more work on this issue this evening, and after noticing that xrandr reported 1024x768 without metamodes I figured out that Ubuntu was overriding the xorg.conf resolution. Changing the display resolution in the Ubuntu settings fixed the problem. Big picture is working fine now, as is streaming. Sorry for the confusion!

[Pierre-Loup]

Neat; glad you got it working!